Who's afraid of the big, bad blog?

"Companies that wish to engage with the blogosphere face an intractable credibility problem. Bloggers are an anti-establishment lot, and messages from big business are automatically suspect. In bloggers' eyes, most companies' attempts to insert themselves into online conversation come across as ham-fisted at best, and disingenuous at worst," reports the Financial Times.

"Business blogging recently took centre stage at BlogOn, a blogging conference in New York, where media consultancy Guidewire Group released a survey that found that big and small companies are rushing to adopt blogging as a business tool. Now some companies have begun to find ways to interact successfully with the blogosphere. The key to success, it turns out, is to take the company out of the picture and let the employees do the blogging."

The article also includes IBM's core blogging guidelines for employees.